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“The answer to all questions of life and death, ‘the absolute solution’ was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveler realizing that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as dear as that of one’s father; trees conversing in dumb show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language.”